You like me! You really like me!

Or so it would seem...

It's been my custom to do a little bragging and begging each time the hit counter has rolled over another 5,000 visits to Upper Left. 25,000 blew by unnoticed, though, and given the growth of this thing, I may just amend practice to every 10,000 visits anyway.

Sometime just before noon, some lucky Seattlite fired up his or her cable modem (you learn a lot from those visitor logs) and registered the 30,000th hit on this site. I know there are folks that do that in an hour or so, but I'm downright tickled. When I first turned on the meter last November, I was pretty pleased when the daily count would edge up to 20. Now, a day with less than ten times that is something of a disappointment. It's a lot more fun to do this when you know people are paying attention.

Along the way, we've moved into the top .03% of the sites monitored by Technorati, and this morning I notice that Upper Left is slotted in the 101st position in the Blogdex rankings. Pretty heady stuff.

None of this would be happening without all of you logging in, and linking up, and leaving comments and generally making most all of my wishes for this thing come true. Thanks so very much, each and every one of you.

It's important to have goals, though, and I've still got a few. You can see the graphics here because a faithful reader hit the PayPal button in the nick of time last month (thanks again, Lucy!), and I was able to pay off the provider of the server space where all the pictures reside. It would be dandy if this thing paid all its own bills, on time, every month. That's a goal.

Another goal derives from an achievement I'm already pretty proud of. Thanks to many of you, the Upper Left Kerry Core account has grown to $1811.00. I started it up when I sent JK a piece of my last unemployment check, knowing that I wouldn't be able to chip in a lot more personally, but hoping I could create an avenue to bundle a few hundred bucks just the same. If that got pumped up to $2000 before the convention (the equivalent of one person's contribution limit) I think it would be remarkable. My original hopes for the Kerry Core account are already surpassed. Now we're on the way to making my wildest dreams come true.

Finally, my ultimate goal is to keep creating content that will keep you coming back, and attract more readers, more links and more comments. And to keep having, and hopefully providing, fun.

And once again, thanks y'all!